USB universal serial bus Imagine replacing all those ports on the back of your PC--mouse, keyboard, serial, parallel, joystick, and more--with a single port. Now imagine you can daisy-chain as many as 127 peripherals off that port and use them all at once. Finally, imagine that the port supports data transfer rates up to 12MB/sec, making it suitable for even high-bandwidth applications such as video. Imagine no more. USB--designed by a consortium of PC manufacturers including Compaq, Digital, and IBM--can do all this and more. At least, it will once USB-ready systems and peripherals hit the market en masse (probably by mid-1997).